Ketharaman Swaminathan

Harmless As Tiny Noticeable Thing Or Explosive As TNT

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Here’s another post on the cultural differences across different markets, with specific lessons for sales and marketing. Many years ago, Fortune had used the following lede to introduce the largest company on its prestigious list of 500 largest corporations in the world: Walmart is the #1 company on the GLOBAL FORTUNE 500. As the largest … Read more

Fintechs Shouldn’t Stop Chanting The Disruption Mantra

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Direct-to-Consumer financial technology startups are new age companies that sell bank accounts, loans and other financial products directly to end users. In this post, we’ll use the term “Fintechs” to refer to these D2C firms and “Fintech” to refer to the industry as a whole. Fintechs are different from “Fincumbents”, which is a term I’ve … Read more

To H-1B Or Not To H-1B… Is A Money Question

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Today’s Economic Times published my letter on H-1B and the controversy over surplus or scarcity of STEM talent in the USA. It was in response to the following article on this subject two days ago. The published version of my letter is a highly condensed version of my original letter. As a result, it’s quite cryptic (even … Read more

Teardown Of The VC Investment Model

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This is a slightly edited version of my answer to the following question on Quora: “We’ll disrupt uncouth taxi unions.” “We’ll kill greedy banks.” “We’ll upend shady realtors.” Startups with noble mission statements like these get billions of dollars of VC funding and enjoy unicorn – or even decacorn –  valuations. As a result, the average … Read more

Discount Is Not The Only Reason For Shopping Online

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At the end of my blog post titled Retail Is Still Barking Up The Wrong Tree Against Ecommerce, I’d made a bold prediction that, within a few months, I’d find a few more non-price related reasons for shopping online. Well, it took me longer than that but I found one recently. This was at the outlet … Read more

Winners Don’t Let Security Screw Up User Experience

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Like me, you may have come across people who appear obsessed with security but happily book cabs, send messages, order food, and even make payments without entering a single password / PIN on their smartphones. This is not as contradictory as it seems if you look at the end-to-end customer journey. For the uninitiated, Customer Journey can … Read more

Will You, Won’t You, Will You, Won’t You Get Your Blockchain App?

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Fans of Lewis Carroll will immediately spot the striking resemblance between the title of this post and the refrain from The Mock Turtle’s Song in Alice in Wonderland. A newly opened electronic brokerage gave free eTrading accounts to all employees of the company in which I was working in circa 2000. I signed up for one immediately. … Read more

Why Do People Make Payments Without A Password After Obsessing Over Security?

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Let’s take the following two statements: Indians are obsessed over security Indians make payments without entering any password. Each of these statements is a fact. But, taken together, they appear contradictory and portray Indian consumers as fickle (or worse). Not true. In this blog post, I’ll use the principles of Customer Journey Mapping to explain why these … Read more

Multiple Choice Questions: Yes, No Or Maybe?

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There are two styles of testing in corporate and academic assessments: Subjective / Descriptive: The test has a question and the test taker – “assessee” in Learning & Assessment Management System-speak – writes their answer on a piece of paper in the case of offline assessment or types their answer into a form in the case of … Read more